Summer 2000
Fauquier County, Virginia
In the coves and hollows of the Blue Ridge foothills, the peace deepens with the summer night. The roar from the interstate has faded. Crickets fall silent one by one. Televisions and computer screens have flickered off. A breeze stirs the stillness and mosquitoes drift lightly through the heavy air.
Inside a cottage a mile up the dirt roads of Apple Mountain, an old soldier tosses in his sleep. His early morning visitors have arrived again, as they always have, night after night, year after year. They stand over him, an old man and an old woman, indistinct faces, Asian faces, blurred by time but close at hand, accusing faces, faces of the dead.
Restless spirits abide, it is said, in a landscape not found on any map. In old Buddhist lore, it’s a place called “Nine Springs,” Ku-chun in Korean. The souls of those who died unjust deaths wander there in search of peace, crying for the injustice, the han, to be set aright.
On this quiet Virginia night, the visitors once more take the old machine gunner back to a place and time of mud and stinking rice paddies, of flares in the blackness, of bugles and screams from the wounded, of lost babies’ cries in a landscape without life. He cannot escape. He rises from his bed and shuffles across the room. He lifts his rifle surehandedly and slowly makes his way to the porch. And there he sits in the shadows once more, weapon at the ready, and peers into the night, down the hillside, and watches. And waits. And again it is the summer of 1950.